Generating domain-specific visual language editors from high-level tool specifications

Domain-specific visual language editors are useful in many areas of software engineering but developing such editors is challenging and time-consuming. We describe an approach to generating a wide range of these graphical editors for use as plug-ins to the Eclipse environment. Tool specifications from an existing meta-tool, Pounamu, are interpreted to produce dynamic, multi-view, multi-user Eclipse graphical editors. We describe the architecture and implementation of our approach, examples of its use realizing domain-specific modelling tools, and strengths and limitations of the approach.